Taken too soon. Andrew Reeves- a tribute

One of the most important voices of the Liberal Movement was silenced today.

In the small hours of 3rd June a heart attack robbed, at the brutally young age of 43, our party and our world of a campaigning Svengali, a gritty realist and one of the most genuine people I have ever met. Without Andrew Reeves in our ranks, the rebuilding of the Liberal Democrats has suddenly become that much harder.

A pioneer of the Liberal enclave of the blogsphere and twitter-feed, Andrew Reeves is one of the reasons that I and dozens of other Lib Dem activists and candidates started blogging in the first place. People might uncharitably ask if the encouragement of platoons of self indulgent hacks to take to the ether is a good thing, but any way you slice it, he helped to drag the Liberal Democrats into the 21st century. God he'd have loved the fact that he's trending 4th on twitter UK right now.

Andrew worked to cultivate an image of himself as a hard nosed no-nonsense bastard, and there were times, if, like me you came to him as a demanding whinging, prima donna candidate, he was quite happy to bring the thunder. He was however, never able to completely conceal the fluffy side of his personality. There was no subtext to Andrew, no second face and no dark side. What you saw was what you got.

2011 will now no longer be remembered by the party as a year that we got bombed into the stone age at the ballot box, but as the year we lost a friend, a campaigning thoroughbred and a lion of both Liberalism and of democracy.

Sleep well mate.